This wasn't a craven murder committed by someone who is a blight on our culture because of his immigration status.

He's a blight on our culture because he was a multiple time felon before this.

This was an accident, like all the other accidents committed by fools in our grotesquely gun-glorifying country.

How so? The gun was stolen from a federal park ranger. By Zarate himself, for all we know.

But it was hard to make Zarate out to be a poster child of what's wrong our broken immigration system if you mention that it was an accident. So that gets left out.

He shouldn't have been here. Despite being a lowlife, he walked right on into this country whenever he felt like it.

There are too many guns in this country. That's what the problem was here. Too many guns available to people who lead rough lives (not to mention all the guns available to children and to people who carry their guns around in the dark and shoot without identifying the target). This had nothing to do with his immigration status.

People will take satisfaction in making him serve his time and deporting him again. But get rid of all the people here illegally and that will not make a dent in the number of gun crimes and gun accidents in this country.

These studies overlook disturbing actual data on crimes committed by criminal aliens. For example, the Government Accountability Office released two unsettling reports in 2005 on criminal aliens who are in prison for committing crimes in the United States, and issued an updated report in 2011.

The first report found that criminal aliens, both legal and illegal, make up 27 percent of all federal prisoners. Yet non-citizens are only about nine percent of the nation’s adult population. Thus, judging by the numbers in federal prisons alone, non-citizens commit federal crimes at three times the rate of citizens.

The findings in the second report are even more disturbing. It reviewed the criminal histories of 55,322 aliens in federal or state prisons and local jails who “entered the country illegally.” Those illegal aliens were arrested 459,614 times, an average of 8.3 arrests per illegal alien, and committed almost 700,000 criminal offenses, an average of roughly 12.7 offenses per illegal alien.

The 2011 GAO report is more of the same. The criminal histories of 251,000 criminal aliens showed that they had committed close to three million criminal offenses. Sixty-eight percent of those in federal prison and 66 percent of those in state prisons were from Mexico. Their offenses ranged from homicide and kidnapping to drugs, rape, burglary, and larceny.Crimes by illegal aliens, not legal immigrants, are the real problem | TheHill